In my opinion....from my personal experiences....

Thanks for the heads up.

 

17 is a great age...
Keep this post somewhere and read it when you are 25, when you are 30, and so on

 

I will keep that in mind.

I think your personal truth is your reality though. To comment on your example, I imagine people who dont believe in gravity probably have some kind of mental disability where either a) they replaced the word gravity with another word, still believing what goes up must come down, b) they believe they are floating and may suffer from some bizarre form of vertigo, c) something else.

 

In my opinion your statements above are invalid. You give no defining proof and site no sources to support said ideas. It simply comes from your head and is presented as fact because it seems logical. You must know what you speak of without a doubt or it is all just hot air.

As a college educated family man, my schooling and experience let me see the flaws that lie within your theory. Time will show you that that most things, including opinion and dogma, all have a place and are not always presented to you simply to sway your belief on something. Often it is only to reaffirm that belief to the presenter. They do not need your belief or concurrence to justify what they think.

That is all...

 

I was on a mock trial team in high school, and if we were "on the stand" as witnesses, and we couldn't remember the answer to a question, we were told to say "I believe" "in my opinion" "in my experience" etc. before making an answer up. It's a great way to be non-committal.

So yes, these statements can be infuriating at times, but I don't think people always use them to present facts. If you say "in my opinion" you're using a disclaimer that says "the following is not a fact".... so if people ARE saying their opinions are facts, then... well... they're not very smart and you shouldn't give what they say much thought.

 

If I have experienced something, then I do indeed have facts.
From my personal experiences, Bee stings do hurt.
That is a fact.
I may embellish the facts to make a point.
"I got stung by a Bee on my hand, it hurt like hell and it swelled up to the size of a basketball!"
That doesn't change the fact that it hurt even if the amount of swelling was not factual.

It is also a way of saying, "This worked for me, but you may have different results."

Besides, if you get a response starting with,
"From my personal experiences" you or someone asked.

 

"In my opinion" means what they are saying is their opinion. Not a fact.

"From my personal experience" means just that and is normally used for advice.

Either you talk to absolute morons or you're not really getting the context in what they're trying to get across.

That's my opinion anyway.

 

+1 to what Chaz said IMO means literally that theyre putting across something that is by definition an opinion and not a fact.

 

When I preface a comment with "in my opinion," I'm either commenting on something that doesn't have an objective truth (e.g., level of entertainment value) or I'm stating an opinion that I acknowledge to be highly debatable, due to lack of available evidence.

There are also times when I employ it as a sarcastic method of understatement, but those don't count.

 

When someone says "in my opinion" to me, it at least tells me that whoever said it knows the subject may not be provable in the classical sense. Many things are black and white, and many things are not black and white. Look at belief systems. Why does anyone "believe" in anything? If our minds were "intended" to be totally objective, why do we have emotions? I'm not talking about being irrational, but purely about the subjective. We all understand concepts and emotions in different ways and contexts, based upon the differences in our personalities. Very interesting, Slant

 

Not really. If you say, "in my opinion, the sky is red," that's relativistic because you're claiming something against what is objectively verifiable.
But each person's own experiences are factual... "I went to New York and didn't like their pizza." That's not relative. I have actually been to New York, and I did not enjoy their pizza. Fact.

To take this thread in a totally different direction, I think "in my opinion" and "in my experience" are most often used to weaken insults or wild statements, like "in my opinion, women shouldn't be able to vote" or "in my experiences, all black people are carjackers."

...but that's just my opinion.

 

Only the Sith think in absolutes.

Oh shiiiiiii...

 

Even the validity of the most objectively performed experiment, which has been reproduced by other people, remains a sum of personal experiences. Saying "in my opinion" at least shows some level of comprehension of that fact. That said, yes, common ground and medium for communication has to be sought which allows as much as possible for others to share the experience, so that they can just agree. A ton, if not all, of conflicts and arguments arise due to our inability to share the same experience.

 

I'd just like to affirm what most others are saying. You have this completely on it's head. If someone says "in my opinion ......" They are specifically informing you that it ISN'T fact. It's just opinion.

It means they are aware of other ponts of view but are leaning towards a certain opinion.

Some people consider their opinion fact. Thats not a problem with the phrases they may use. It's a problem with the belief system of the person.

To sum up, nice idea but not quite right

Oh, and I think you need to add a "in my opinion" to the beginning of your OP ;P

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact

 

In my opinion, Valkyrie was a good movie. I liked it. Some people were bothered by the lack of German accents, but I thought it was fine without them.

Is my opinion, as a personal artistic preference, invalid? Well, it does not reflect any objective truth, granted. There is no objective measure of how entertaining a movie is, unless you are performing brain scans and hormone tests and then accounting for age, sex, body size, and so forth. But that doesn't mean my opinion does not add any weight to a discussion. It does, along with everyone else's. Why? Because Bryan Singer cares. Studios care. They want to please audiences, because happy audiences mean more revenue, and more revenue means more cash for future productions.

 

Slant,
What would you use, or do use in place of "In my opinion", and "From my experiences".?